CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Language Development
Lorenzo de' Medici Institute
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY
Lesson #9 Language development
Dott. Marco Ciapetti
www.marcociapetti.it [email protected] © Marco Ciapetti Language
Definition
System of communication that uses symbols to transmit information between members of the same cultural community
● Semantics ● Morpheme ● Grammar ● Syntax ● Inflections ● Intonation ● Phonology ● Pragmatic www.marcociapetti.it [email protected] © Marco Ciapetti Theories on language
Behaviourist approach
Language learning is based on the same learning processes of operant conditioning: association between stimulus and response.
Word is the reinforcement produced by the environment for the presence of a stimulus
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Nativist approach (Chomsky)
Language acquisition is explained as an innate mechanism that matures according to a timetable that is driven by our biology maturation, rather than by interaction with the environment: ● This process is guided by a device called LAD (Language acquisition device - modular approach). ● Children try to extend grammatical rules to new linguistic productions called overregularisation errors on verbs and plurals (I runned home). ● There is a critical period for language learning, out of this period is very hard to learn to speak. (see infant savage – Victor/Genie)
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Cognitive-developmental approaches
The nativist approach suggests that language is separate from other cognitive functions.
Cognitive-developmental approaches emphasise the interaction between cognitive and language development:
● in order to learn the meaning of words and sentences, children first need to have a concept of the things being referred to ● focus on period between 18 months and 2 year of age
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How can we learn language?
● Groups of 4 people – chose 1 spokesman ● 15 min.
● Think about your first period in Italy: which were been the challenges that you have faced listening and learning Italian language? ● Think about infants: are the challenges that they have to face developing languages similar to yours in learning a new language? ● Which are the differences? Which are the resources and advantages that you have and babies 'not, and vice versa?
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Stages
Preverbal period - challenges
● Chategorical speech perception (the ability to discriminate between categories of phonemes) ● voice onset time (VOT) ● cultural ability to discriminate particular phonemes (r/l in chinese and japanese people)
● Speech segmentation (where one word ends and the next begins)
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Stages
Preverbal period
● Preference to prosody of the native language (that’s why we talk to children also if we know that they don’t understand).
● The special way parents usually speak to their babies is called Motherese or child-directed speech (CDS). (CDS is characterised by slow and careful pronunciation of words, longer pauses between words and exaggerated intonation – with emotional tone of speech) The CDS increases the interest of the baby for the adult voice
● Visual interaction
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Stages
Early sounds
appears very similar across different languages and is driven, in part, by physical changes in the tongue, mouth and position of the larynx in the throat
● First sounds are more physiological (cries, burps, grunts).
● Around 2 months infants begin to produce one-syllable vowel sounds such as “ooh” or consonant-vowel combination like “goo”. This is known as cooing. If first sounds were expression of discomfort, now it seems these sounds are expression of positive emotions (association with smiles).
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Stages
Early sounds
● From 6 to 10 months babies show reduplicated babbling. Production of syllables made up of a consonant followed by a vowel (“ba”,”na”). From now babies add more sounds to their babbling patterns.
● By 12 to 18 months it may sound like infants are attempting to carry on a conversation also if their are just babbling.
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Stages
Early sounds
● There is a big debate on the cultural aspects of babbling: do babies babble using sounds of their native language?
● The importance of babbling is in the feedback the baby receives from his own sound. This is showed in studies on deaf children: they babble but the nature and developmental course of their babbling differs from that of children with normal hearing.
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Stages
Gestural communication
● Emerges between 8 to 10 months as a request of attention by the mother. (Bruner describes how an infant “asks” his mother to bring an object by extending his arm towards the object and opening/closing the hand, and then looking back at the mother)
● Referential communication emerges between 11-12 months: ● showing: baby holds up an object for adults to look at. ● giving: a baby passes an object for comment or approval. ● pointing: to draw attention to an object.
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Stages
Gestural communication
● From 12 to 18 this actions (showing – giving – pointing) are accompanied by vocalizations.
● There is a close relationship between referential communication and word learning. Children who show more gestural labelling are better at vocal labelling (early symbolic ability).
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Stages
First words – receptive vocabulary
● Word recognition: by 7-8 months of age infants seem capable of identifying and remembering new spoken words. ● The very first words they learn are associated to caregivers. Children turn towards mother or father when hear the word “mom” or “dad”. ● Receptive vocabulary grows slowly but regularly from 12 to 24 months, with differences from child to child. ● Size and rate of early vocabulary seems to vary across cultures and probably related to different parental expectations and differences in exposure of children to language stimulations.
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Stages
First words – production
● Word production: around 12 months most children pronounce their first word. ● During this period childs use sounds in a word-like way to refer to things in their environment. ● After producing their first words, children continue to babble and use communicative gestures for some months. ● Their productive vocabulary develops fairly slowly, reaching 20–70 words by 18 months of age ● Holophrases: one word expression which contain a bigger meaning.
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Stages
First words – production
● 2 years children start using two-word sentences where one word is the center of the sentence and other words direct the meaning. ● After 18-20 months children have an acceleration in the word learning process: Vocabulary explosion (by 18 months children know 20-70 words). ● The word learning continues and by 6 years old children achieve a vocabulary of about 14000 words (around six new words per day)
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Stages
Vocabulary and concept development
Children follow different process of construction of the vocabulary: ● Overextension: a child learned what is a dog and calls “dog” all the animals with same features (tail, 4 legs, …) ● Underextension: a child apply a label only to a specific object (car is only father’s car).
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Stages
How can we help childs in language acquisition?
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Stages
Vocabulary and concept development ● Gentner, Anggoro and Klibanoff studied how children construct relational categories in word development
“The knife is the “The knife goes dax for the with the watermelon“ watermelon”
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Stages
Vocabulary and concept development
Can relational language help in acquiring relational categories? ● The answer is yes for 3- to 5-year- olds. This group learned the relational concept only when it was labeled with a relational term. ● The oldest group, 6-year-olds, could derive the relational concept from a single exemplar with or without relational language. ● The 2-year-olds, failed to learn the relational concept in either condition.
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Reading
Uta Frith model of development of reading
1.Logographic Stage: children recognize word as images
2.Phonological stage: children begin to learn the rules of how graphemes corrispond to phonemes
3.Orthographic stage: children possess the rules of spelling and orthographic conventions of their own language
www.marcociapetti.it [email protected] © Marco Ciapetti Assignments
● Assignment task submission deadline Wed. 18/04 – time 9.10 – in hard copy ● Study Handbook Cap 7 – pp. 228-275 ● Download and study this slides by: http://www.marcociapetti.it/wordpress/child-psychology/ (password: lesson09)
● Download slides of Guest lesson (The development of the neural basis of emotion processing – on lesson#08 – 04/04) by: http://www.marcociapetti.it/wordpress/child-psychology/ (password: guest-lesson)
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